RIP. Recommend the very funny episode, "LeBeau and the Little Old Lady."

Oh, shit. I loved Frenchie. sigh

He was 96, already an adult when he got out of the Nazi concentration camps where he had survived for years. Hell of a run.

Was excellent on Hogan's Heroes.

He spoke at my high school in the early 80s because of the rise of holocaust deniers. He lost most of his family in the death camps. I hope he has reunited with them, and has found peace. He was a good man.

Can you imagine trying to get that show made today? The pitch meeting:

“Got an idea for a tv show set in WWII.”

“Love it! Tell me more…”

“It’s got a multi-ethnic cast, from a number of the different nations of Europe.”

“Great! Folks love diversity, and exotic locales. Where’s it take place?”

“The setting? It’s a concentration camp.”

“Um…”

“Several of the main characters are Nazis, and we’ve got swastikas everywhere.”

“…”

“Oh, I forgot - it’s a comedy!”

“Get the fuck out of my office.”

...and staring a really creepy sex addict as the title character.

Thanks for posting this! He was really great on the show. Interestingly, while he was the only Jew to play a POW on the show, he was NOT the only Jew in the cast- all of the main actors who played Nazi officials (Werner Klemperer, John Banner, Leon Askin, and Howard Caine) were Jewish, and while Clary was the only Holocaust survivor, Klemperer, Banner, and Askin were refugees from the Nazis.

> It’s a concentration camp.

POW camp but I catching what you're throwing.

An interview he gave on surviving a concentration camp, and then being liberated from another

... and Klemperer, Banner, Askin, and Caine only agreed to play the parts of Nazis if they were portrayed as bumbling incompetents.

The only one to whom that was ever attributed was a Klemperer, IIRC. He’d had plenty of previous experience playing Nazis in Hollywood (most famously in Judgment in Nuremberg) and was very alarmed when he went to the audition for Hogan’s Heroes and realized that it was meant to be a comedy. At the time he described the show as a workplace comedy that could have just as easily taken place at General Motors.

Interestingly, if you’ve seen the pilot you’ll notice that Larry Hovis, who plays Carter, is actually a one-off character and instead the main gang includes a tailor named Vladimir Minsk. He never showed up again after the pilot, and that’s because Leonid Kinskey, who played him, was also Jewish and was so disturbed by the concept of a comedy with Nazis that he walked. (Kinskey is probably most famous for playing Sascha the bartender in Casablanca and was also a refugee from the Nazis.)

Post-Hogan, Robert Clary began a run in daytime television (Days of Our Lives, Young & The Restless, et al). He will be missed.

“Many years ago, before the concept of ‘too soon’ existed, there was a show about a bunch of goofy Nazis running a prison camp.”

The only situation comedy I’ve ever seen where good outsmarted evil every week.

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We just got Jojo Rabbit a couple of years ago, I don’t see how this is any more absurd.

I gotta think the whole pitch involved taking Sgt Schultz from Stalag 17 and surrounding him with some wisecracking Americans. They didn't even change the character's name

It's a pretty interesting show: in most military sitcoms, the army is the enemy, and the protagonists are the operators who are trying to get around the army's rules and have a little fun. Hogan's different - there are no episodes where the group is trying to get around Klink because there's a party in Hamelburg. They're commandos with a mission every week, and the comedy has to arise from the mission. This is a long way around of saying that it's actually a distant James Bond clone, closer in concept to the Man from UNCLE than it is to McHale's Navy or the early years of MASH.

Co-created by Albert Ruddy, who went on to produce The Godfather.

I always wondered if Hogan's Heroes in some way inspired Blackadder Goes Forth.

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IIRC Werner Klemperer insisted that Klink was never allowed to win, not even once.

Catchy intro song also....

Mine, too! Was coming here to say that. We had a big enough Jewish population that we had some of the Jewish holidays off of school. We were also the community that Nazi’s tried to march on in the 80s. Holocaust denial was not something we tolerated.

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Shh, the “you couldn’t make this mostly tame work of art that my 60 year old parents love today” crowd is talking

You think JoJo Rabbit is on the same level as Hogans Heroes?

Well, if anyone could pull off a pitch meeting like that, it would be Ryan George.

"C'mon! Nobody could break out of a prison camp!"

"Actually, it'll be super easy, barely an inconvenience"

"Oh Really?"

No! Little Lebau!!!

I'm in my mid-40's. Growing up, my dad and I would watch Hogan's Heroes together (among other shows). He passed earlier this year, and I've been seeing reruns of Hogan's Heroes on so I've been watching them again. It's actually been therapeutic for me. Brought back some good memories of him and I together just from watching this show. And it's a great show. Holds up.

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Why use the euphemism "passed away". He died.

Now add in the lead's ... proclivities. Back then it was kept under wraps until his brutal demise. That secrecy would not happen now.

The few times he "won" it was simply to keep his incompetent ass in place, so the leads could keep doing their thing.

I'm going to need you to get all the way off of my back about that.

Mel Brooks at that pitch meeting: I love it!

There's a really great fan theory that Klink was actually a allied spy who was intentionally fucking up every week to try to help the POWs escape without letting on that he was helping them.

"Passed away" implies that he died peacefully of natural causes, which he did. "Died" implies something less peaceful. Which is why it's hilarious when BoredPanda has to protect everybody's poor wittle feewings by saying someone "passed away of a shark attack".

It's a euphemism. You have it precisely backwards, The joke is that people use the euphemism to take the sting of death away, It doesn't matter if you die peacefully or die from a shark. You are dead.

I don't like that fan theory, but it is funny to consider what that would imply.

Klink would have been pulling what's left of his hair out as day after day he weakens the security of his camp to allow the prisoners to escape, and instead not a single POW escapes the entire war